Resume screening is a necessary task for any company or other employer interested in filling an employee position. It is a task that can cost many hours of work by human resources departments every time a company fills a position when the resumes are screened manually. Computer technology and the Internet has enabled candidates to send in resumes for positions with the click of a button, but a company may receive hundreds of resumes for a single open position. With manual resume screening, someone in HR at the company must read at least a portion of each resume in order to screen candidates. Further, the person screening the resumes may need to have some level of skill in the position or other knowledge about the position to make good judgments about the applicants, resulting in the valuable time of technical, or otherwise expert individuals being spent sifting through resumes.
Additionally, a person screening resumes manually may exhibit biases that affect their judgment when deciding on candidates. While the biases may be unintentional and/or subtle, the effect may be that good candidates go overlooked. Consistently hiring good candidates can be difficult when the resume screening process is spread among many people, each with their own set of biases, opinions, levels of knowledge etc. Providing an automated method of resume screening that is accurate and inclusive of all candidate factors is a challenge based on the complexity and varied information provided by the many candidate resumes received as well as the potentially wide variety of roles or positions at a given entity.